WolfsBurg, VW Plant, worth seeing?

No, you haven't seen it, or No, it is not worth seeing? What did you like about the dresden factory? THank you again. :)

The Wolfsburg VW plant is worth visiting, especially if you are interested in cars. This is a very large VW plant and corporate headquarters. I suggest a visit to the Autostadt which is a visitor center with exhibits. Plant tours can be arranged. Visit this site: http://www.autostadt.de/en/ for details. The Autostadt is open nearly every day, but plant tours are not offered every day, as I recall. Another person mentioned die Gläsernen Manufaktur (transparent factory) in Dresden. If you are in the area of Dresden, it is indeed worth visiting. The VW Phaeton (BMW 7 class or Mercedes S class equivalent) is built here but the plant is like no other since there are many, many options a buyer can specify. I think it opened in 2001. It is located in the center of town with parts delivered "just in time" by the Dresden tram system. It is quite unusual but is mainly a low volume specialty plant. For information visit here: http://www.glaesernemanufaktur.de/gmd.jsp?dok=&lang=&docid=&ap= I'm not sure where you are traveling from but since Dresden has been mentioned, there is a new (opened May 2005 with full production several months later) BMW plant in Leipzig which is an easy day trip from Berlin. It was designed by Zaha Hadid and is a spectacular campus which BMW spent around €1.5 billion to build. This plant was built as part of the East German reconstruction efforts and one of the few German BMW plants outside of Bavaria. The people of Leipzig seem quite proud of the plant. It is an example of a very modern, high volume plant. Tours are available. For information visit here: http://www.bmw-werk-leipzig.de/leipzig/deutsch/lowband/com/en/index.html
There are many car plants and museums in Germany. Usually they are never mentioned in tour guides, but several are worth a special trip.

Hi Sharon. I went to the Autostadt last summer in Wolfsburg and enjoyed it. We didn't go to the VW plant but saw the exhibits in the KundenCenter (literally "customer center" but I think we would call it the visitor center). The Autostadt also has a number of pavilions that focus on certain kinds of cars, like the Lamborghini pavilion and the Skoda pavilion.

Good to know, My husband is manufacture engineer for John Deere and looking forward to visiting the VW plant. Dresden looks good. What else have you seen in Dresden that is good to visit?

I did visit the Wolfsburg VW plant, and I loved the tour. It is a massive plant, and they also had a little museum of VW history there, too.

Since you're husband is an engineer, I'll answer your question about Dresden with a bit of engineering slant. Dresden is a nice small city with museums and a river which runs through it. However, its interest is in its history. On Feb 13, 1945, just weeks before VE day on May 7, 1945, the Allies bombed Dresden killing about 50K people and destroying the town (the basis for the famous antiwar novel Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut). At the center of the city is the Frauenkirche, a Lutheran church completed in the 1740's by the town architect long before modern engineering techniques or tools. The building resembles a large stone bell and from my looks into the design had only one major design problem in what would have been a very difficult project. However, the building collapsed during the bombing and lay in a pile of rubble in the town Zentrum for 50 years until after East Germany fell. Beginning in the 1990's and lasting about ten years, the church was reconstructed from original drawings using as many stones the could be salvaged from the pile. The story and details of this reconstruction will probably fascinate your husband and is quite inspirational to anyone. I do not know the exact amount spent, but it must be in the range of €150 million. Through several visits over the years, I watched its reconstruction. It is well worth a visit. See: http://www.frauenkirche-dresden.de/ For more conventional advice about what to see in Dresden, see Rick Steves' Guidebook.

Thank you everyone for all the great info. We really appreciate it.

Even further out of your way (if you're in N. Germany), but related to the topic of cars is the Mercedes and Porsche factories and museums in Stuttgart. Both Mercedes and Porsche have museums and you can tour their factories (although Porsche's tour is limited through this summer). Been to both and they were fascinating and I really don't care about cars so much.